Well, creating a marketing funnel is an excellent move for your Accounting firm. It would be a great way to boost your lead management process, as is the case for over 67% of B2B businesses.
The process is not complex but would require you to use the most relevant strategies for your industry to get the best results.
Generally, a marketing funnel refers to a hypothetical customer journey. It involves 3 primary stages which you put your leads through before they eventually become paying customers. At each stage, customers experience your business differently.
The stages of a marketing funnel.
Every stage is critical to your business as it creates the steppingstone for the next. The three main ones include;
The top of the funnel:
The middle of the funnel:
The bottom of the funnel:
Your company can influence consumers at every stage, leading to more sales, loyalty, and brand awareness.
The top of the funnel: Awareness.
It is the first stage of the marketing funnel, known as the Awareness or lead generation stage. At this stage, your prospects interact with your business for the first time and thus have limited knowledge. They are not even ready to buy anything.
So, at this point, you'd need to create tons of content about your accounting firm and the related subject matter. As they interact within your content, they learn more about your firm and could be willing to engage in the future.
For maximum results here, you'll need to invest in optimization so that your messages get to the right audience. An accounting firm like yours could probably work with a blog, webinars, eBooks, videos, among others.
You'll also want to set specific targets so it is easy to measure progress and success. Set up systems to determine:
If the prospects/target audience viewing, interacting, and sharing your content
If there is any follow-through after interacting with your content
Most successful firms with lead generation use marketing automation tools. These give you real-time analytical data you can use to measure your results.
Middle of the Funnel: Consideration.
At the second stage of the marketing funnel, your content has captured the attention of some of your prospects. They are expected to be considering your offering as a potential solution. This is usually evident from their response to your brand awareness content earlier.
You can expect that this number is lower than in the awareness stage. Unlike the masses, these leads probably want to know a little more about your offering. They are halfway into deciding on a purchase.
That considered, at this point, you want to focus on further illustrating to them:
How your offering helps their business
What differentiates you from their other options.
Commonly, service businesses like yours would embark on sharing more personal content to leads at this level. The process is "leads nurturing." You can send period emails, book meetings, etc. All these are to provide additional information to help them in their decision-making.
AT the consideration stage, you can measure your success by how your leads respond to your communications. For example, if they sign up for a free accounting system demo or inquire about your pricing structure, it might be a good sign.
Bottom of the funnel: Conversions.
The final stage of the marketing funnel mainly revolves around conversions. Now, how you determine conversion rates depends on your goals. It could be; how many leads pay for your services, how many sign up for specific offerings, etc.
At this point, much of your attention goes into selling your product to the most interested / "Sales-qualified" leads. Note that such leads are also usually evaluating other alternatives to decide which one to buy.
So, your task is to answer their most pending questions. All your communications must show them:
Why your offering beats the competition
Why you have the best deals and value (discounts, promotions, etc.).
How easy it is to purchase your service
After winning customers, an unmentioned task would be to deliver standard services to encourage long-term contracts and boost loyalty. When these customers are satisfied, they are also very likely to recommend you to others.
All in all,
These are the three major stages of the marketing funnel you can apply to your accounting firm. The marketing funnel stages represent the different points of lead generation, lead nurturing and lead conversion for your firm.
With the right automation and communications tactics, your firm's marketing funnel would help you generate massive leads and achieve high conversions down the road.
As you might notice, valuable content is the fuel that drives them all. So invest in great outputs to maximize returns from your funnels.
If you are unsure about building a marketing funnel from scratch, reach out to our team of experts.
